


for all the rain that has been

by firelilyblooms



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, F/M, Five Years Later, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Slow Burn, Trauma, on hiatus but not abandoned!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:13:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25116697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firelilyblooms/pseuds/firelilyblooms
Summary: “Isn’t that what great love is supposed to do?” she wondered aloud, “Consume you?"Or, Katara rediscovers herself and finds him along the way.[On hiatus for a little while until the wheel of hyperfixations spins back around to ATLA]
Relationships: Iroh & Katara (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 78
Kudos: 213





	1. i. too much, and never enough

**i. too much, and never enough**

She slept little and late these days. The Temple was too cold, too hot. Too empty, too full. Stifling, like the blankets they lay in, naked and spent after another day of flying, another evening of unmet expectations. 

Aang snored, rolled over and settled his body around hers. The fresh stubble on his chin brushed her skin. Grated. He sighed her name into the wind and _spirits_ , she couldn't _breathe_ anymore. 

The pendant he'd spent weeks carving swung on a noose of velvet around her throat, hanging just above her mother's. Intricate, a swirling pattern dominated by the symbol for air, intertwined with the symbol for water. They didn't even _give_ betrothal necklaces in the Southern Tribe.

The dress hung on the silk screen, a simple thing made of buttery cotton and modeled in part after Avatar Yangchen’s robes. It hadn’t been her first choice -- but it made Aang so happy to see her in it, that she couldn’t say no. 

_A symbol of peace and unity_ , he had said. 

How strange it still was to no longer be at war. 

Peace.

Was that what this was? This gnawing at her guts, this clawing at her throat like she needed to scream. The nightmares that plagued her waking hours whenever she stopped moving and the terrors that needled their way into her dreams and painted dark circles under her eyes. 

She felt it in her, this hungry, pulsating thing. And suddenly could see it all so clearly. Her life, if she could even call it that anymore, laid out before her like a cadaver -- pried open and pinned so that they could prod around at her insides. 

_Tomorrow,_ the pendant whispered against her skin. 

So she tied the necklace to Appa's saddle, packed her bag, and left. 

* * *

The catamaran had taken constant effort to maintain as she approached the bay of Kyoshi Island. After a night and a day feeling every bite of the icy southern seas, she found herself grateful for the warm waters and smooth currents that greeted her here.

Suki was already at the Southern Temple with the others, so she had fallen into Ty Lee’s arms instead. 

“What happened?” Ty Lee asked. 

She opened her mouth, but found that she could not speak. 

The thought of Aang gliding into the bay settled like a pit in her stomach and kept her glancing over her shoulder. 

They were not unkind to her, the Warriors. Ty Lee surprisingly so, given the circumstances. She supposed the news had not gotten to them yet, but then again they all knew why Suki was gone, so she was sure they had made their guesses. 

They supplied her with food and drink (mostly sashimi from their fishing boats and a dry purple-pink wine that they traded at neighboring Earth Kingdom ports), and she did not overlook the way that one of them was stationed with her at all times.

She spent three days with the warriors, before the looks of pity and the rock settling into her stomach drove her to the docks with a bundle of food slung over her shoulder and four full waterskins. She left twenty gold pieces on Suki's pillow, so it wasn’t _technically_ stealing, but she couldn't help but feel like a thief as she secreted herself into the night and set a course to the east.

* * *

She hadn't meant to come all this way. Not really. 

At first, after Kyoshi, she was just going to stop in Omashu. See Bumi and maybe venture into the Cave of the Two Lovers, just to see it again. It really had been beautiful. But the rise of the city across the gorge made something tight and cold hitch in her chest. 

She thought about turning around and heading home. Her real home. The South Pole. But the thought of the snow and the ice and the _cold_ made her breath come out in shallow, short puffs and her heartbeat pound in her ears. Her fingers brushed the fabric of her tunic, just above her heart. 

She hitched a ride with a cabbage merchant to Gaoling, instead. On the road, she could breathe, slow and languid. Though the merchant was not much of a conversationalist, she had enough of stories to tell for the both of them. 

But, when Toph’s school came into view the feeling returned. The tightness, the aching.

She asked the merchant how long to get to the city. He said he could still take her half of the way, so she paid him double and he brought her to the outer walls. 

* * *

Ba Sing Se greeted her like an old friend. The city had thrived in the five years since the war had ended, thanks to the reparations and repatriation of citizens from the colonies by the Fire Nation. 

"Express line to Yu Shen station!" the conductor called, "Upper Ring." 

The bitter chill of winter was only just beginning to give way to spring in the Earth Kingdom, and citizens bustled around her in the station with their scarves still pulled up over their faces. She slipped into the train car, bag clutched to her chest and the train began to move and finally, _finally_ , she could breathe. 

She found the Jasmine Dragon in much the same condition as she had left it, and her dear friend with it. 

"My little fish," Iroh bellowed, a wide smile spreading across his face when she stepped through the door as the last rays of sun slipped behind the golden tile roofs of the Upper Ring, "Your last letter... You did not tell me that you would be visiting." 

"Surprise," she smiled weakly. 

“And a welcome one at that,” he said. 

He had grown rounder in her absence, the ripeness of old age settling into him as though he had been born for it. New lines creased the edges of his mouth, the corners of his eyes, and when he pulled her into his arms, she breathed in the familiar scent of ginseng tea and smoke.

"Uncle." She bit back tears. She didn't need to say more, and she was grateful. 

When the last customer was shooed from the Jasmine Dragon, Iroh locked up early. She tried to protest, insisting that she could not be responsible for losing business. 

He waved her stutters away. "The company of an old friend is worth more than any gold piece." 

“So tell me,” he heated her cup of tea in his palm-- jasmine, by the smell of it-- and she was grateful for it's warmth as she clutched it between her hands. “What brings you to my little shop?” 

"I don't… I-I can't..." she stammered, her voice barely above a whisper when the silence had stretched too long and too thin. She absentmindedly brushed her fingertips across her mother’s necklace, trailing down to her collarbone and finally resting her hand over her heart.

The dark buzz filled her chest and she squeezed her eyes shut. 

Iroh hummed, resting his teacup on his protruding belly. 

"Business is booming," he said without missing a beat, "And I am slow, these days. A tea shop is too much for an old man to run by himself, no? " 

* * *

It had taken her a day to learn how to serve tea, a week to learn the orders and names of all of the regulars, and a month to learn to sleep with Iroh's snoring on the tatami mat next to hers. There were other rooms she could have stayed in, but he didn’t mind and neither did she. 

She woke as she pleased, lazing in the sun and stretching out her tired muscles in a slow, methodical rhythm. She spent her mornings in the tea shop and afternoons at the market, selecting ingredients for dinner. Iroh, she quickly discovered, loved her cooking, so she experimented with everything that the center of commerce had to offer. Braised komodo rhino with jook, eggplant and lobster-crab stew, bean curd dumplings drenched in a sweet and spicy sauce. He added fire flakes to nearly everything. She tried them exactly once and instantly sputtered and coughed and turned a shade that could only be described as _tomato_.

After their evening meal, when business slowed or Iroh was simply ready for a break, they would close up shop and play Pai Sho into the long hours of the evening. He won often, and she spoke little. That was just the way of it, and Iroh seemed to enjoy her company, anyway. 

Mostly she liked that he didn't make her talk about it. 

When Iroh adjourned for the night with great yawn, she would kiss his cheeks and retire to the garden. She ran through her forms in the small pond at its center, pushing through the tightness in her chest and the tremble in her fingertips. A family of turtleducks moved in mid-spring, the babies quacking and nipping at her ankles in the soft moonlight. 

She couldn’t bend every night, but she tried. Wobbly bubbles with koi swirling inside that rose into the sky before bursting, dousing her with a resounding _splash_. Thin whips of water that coiled around her fingertips. Tiny icebergs that the turtleducks maneuvered around, honking whenever one got in their way. 

All of it left her breathless, spent. ( _Some Master she was…)_

Sometimes when her efforts refused any and all fruition, she just sat in the pond, and cried. 

And when she had so thoroughly worn out her body or her mind that she could do little more than drag herself up the stairs, she sank into her futon with a heavy sigh and drifted off to a dreamless sleep, carried on the waves of Iroh’s steady breathing. 

There was a kind of stillness to it. To this new normal.

* * *

He wrote her often. 

It hadn’t taken him long to find her -- once he had exhausted his lead with the Kyoshi Warriors, he had moved on to Toph. 

Toph had (of course) made one of her students write a letter laced with profanity. It admonished her for making Toph ride all that way to the Southern Air Temple ( _in a boat that she couldn't even see on, goddammit)_ only to show up to not only no wine, but no stupid wedding either. 

The Fire Lord and his wife were far too busy to host guests these days, and she had made it no secret that she hated the North Pole, so there was really no other place that she would have gone. 

Iroh took long walks, made lengthy calls to flirt with the wealthy widow Madame Soo Yin down the road when the letters arrived. He passed each one to her and left her to the burning feeling welling up from her toes to her ears without any prying eyes to scrutinize her.

A quiet mercy. 

* * *

_Katara,_

_I miss you. I don’t understand what I did wrong. Sokka says I should just give it time and that you’re still healing, but I’ve been_ giving _it time and you still won’t talk to me. I don’t know what to do._

_I still love you. We can make this work. Please come back._

_Aang_

* * *

She did not write him back.

* * *

When, two months into her stay, she once again awoke to the sound of her own scream dying in her throat, it felt like a betrayal. She gasped for breath, reached out for it, but it eluded her in thick, violent sobs. 

Floorboards creaked and blankets rustled. A warm hand rubbed lazy circles on her back. 

“You are safe,” he murmured, a rote tenderness in his voice as if he had practice with calming people from nightmares, “You are whole.”

She crawled into Uncle’s arms and cried. 

* * *

She ran, leaving bloody footprints through the snow. Bare foot scraping over ice, toes red and raw, and dead. 

Behind her, it gained.

She stumbled, foot clipping permafrost under a blanket of white. A sickening crunch, ribs hitting rock. 

It circled, pulsating dark energy in waves of blue and purple and black. A too-wide smile spread in the darkness. 

And then, it lunged. 

* * *

Hei Lee fawned over Aang with a special kind of claustrophobia. 

From dawn until dusk, there was scant a moment that she was not biting at his heels. She weasled her way into their table at breakfast and inserted herself into their sparring matches. Toph had suggested that she threaten the Air Acolyte with ice daggers, and as Hei Lee elbowed through a crowd to stand at Aang’s side opposite her, she considered it.

If she had not drawn a firm line on their first night at the Temple, she was certain that Hei Lee would have wedged her way into their bed, too. 

“Today, we honor Monk Tang Xu and his historic ninety-six day fast," Aang smiled out at the crowd gathered before them and gave her hand a squeeze before dropping it, “By telling his story and abstaining ourselves, we bring ourselves closer to peace. Closer to enlightenment. On the first day of his fast, Monk Tang Xu contemplated food, but he found his sustenance from the universe around him. On the second day of his fast, Monk Tang Xu…” 

Somewhere between the fourteenth and fifteenth days, she slipped away, back into the Temple.

She wandered aimlessly, having long since discovered every nook and cranny; this was not the first celebration for a fasting monk. It wasn’t that she hated this ceremony as much as she hated the way that the gnawing maw opened in her. These weren't her stories, her people. 

She sat by one of the ponds for a while, tracing circles and spirals with her fingers and watching the gentle waves dance, and she longed for the ocean. But they had just returned from the South Pole last week; it was too soon to return again. 

When she grew bored of the water, she returned to the ceremony and the dozens of meditating Acolytes as Monk Tang Xu finished his eight-eighth day of fasting. When she settled on her knees, leaning back on her heels behind Aang.

“He didn’t miss you, you know,” Hei Lee muttered under her breath, so quiet that only she could hear. 

And it was true. He didn’t glance behind him, didn’t even notice that she had been gone for nearly an hour. 

When the story was finished, Aang rang the gong. Over his shoulder, Hei Lee smirked at her as Aang embraced her and thanked the Acolyte for putting this ceremony together. The thoughts of ice daggers came to mind again. 

In the time when dinner was supposed to be ( _we're abstaining, remember?)_ he took her hands and flew with her to the highest point of the Southern Air temple.

Aang dropped to one knee and pulled the necklace from his robes, and it really had been so sweet after nearly four years together -- even if it was a Northern tradition and not a Southern one. When she nodded, he kissed her. He strung the necklace around her throat, settling the sapphire pendant just above her mother’s. 

They pushed a chest of drawers against the door behind them when they returned to their room -- it turned out of all the Nomad traditions, the one she hated most was their lack of locks -- and when he pressed into her, she supposed she was happy, here, in this moment, in their union. 

When they were finished ( _he was finished_ ) and Hei Lee had quieted her incessant knocking at their door, they gathered themselves up for the midnight breakfast with the others. He pulled on his robes and grinned at her, sloppy and sweet. 

“Go on without me,” she said, “I’ll be down soon.” 

And he didn’t stay. 

An emptiness filled her, and truth be told, all she really wanted to do was sleep.

* * *

“Love is a strange beast,” Iroh said, placing the boat tile onto the Pai Sho board. 

She moved her white jade tile two spaces. 

“It is powerful, the kind of stuff that can move mountains, topple nations. Much like this tile topples your defense!” He countered, placing the rose tile in her home gate and chuckling. “But if we are not careful, it can consume us.” 

“Isn’t that what great love is supposed to do?” she wondered aloud, “Consume you?

Iroh hummed, but did not answer. 

* * *

There were so many things Katara had forgotten that she loved. 

She loved tea (and drank it often). 

She loved books (and read them often.) 

She loved to cook for Iroh, and relished in the way his eyes fluttered closed when she made something truly spectacular. 

She loved to be alone, and she loved to just _talk_ with people. She spent hours sitting with customers, with the regulars, with travelers visiting Ba Sing Se for the very first time. They regaled her with stories and -- upon discovering who she was -- she regaled them with her own.

She loved to heal people. She found a children's infirmary in the Lower Ring and spent many of her afternoons tending to coughs, and scrapes, and broken bones, and ripped, tattered dolls that she mended with a needle and thread, rather than her hands. 

She just loved the children, really. 

She loved sunrises -- something she rarely caught before. ( _I rise with the moon, you rise with the sun_ )

She loved pastries with sweet cream. 

She loved fire lilies. 

She loved the warm summer breeze on her skin (even when she missed the ice).

Mostly, she learned to love her bending, again. 

Loved watching the waves rise up around her, again. Loved the push and pull of the water around her knees, again. Loved the way it responded to her like an old friend, like a long-distance lover desperate, aching towards her caress. 

She loved the whispering against her flesh when the trembling stopped and she loved the way it thrummed within her like a little heartbeat again, the gentle lull of _stay stay stay stay stay._

* * *

“Good morning,” she greeted the courier. Spring had come and gone, and the summer sun was just beginning to warm the air. 

“Master Katara,” the courier gave her a short duck of his head in greeting and reached into his bag. He passed her a stack of bundled letters tied with a thin piece of twine, before retreating down the steps towards his next delivery. 

As she shut the door to the shop, she plucked apart the strings, shuffling through the week’s mail. _Bill. Bill. Advertisement. Invitation. Invitation. Invitation. Advertisement. Bill._

A letter from Sokka had arrived, so she tucked that under her arm for later reading. He had finally stopped asking her about Aang, and had moved on to gushing about Suki and little Jinji. 

_He was a bender at only 3 years old! The first Southern waterbender in a generation._

It made her heart sing. 

Thin, dull envelopes one after another after another made her eyes glaze over until her fingers stilled on a thick, creamy envelope the color of cranberries in the late fall with edges dipped in gold. 

“Uncle!” she called into the shop. 

Iroh tore into the letter ravenously, scanning the heavy, yellow parchment with quivering hands and a wide smile. She was suddenly embarrassed, like she was intruding on something deeply private, so she busied herself pulling down chairs from tables. 

“Nephew will be visiting the Earth King at the end of this month before the council meets,” he beamed when he was finally finished, “He arrives in six days.”

* * *

He slipped into the tea shop before dawn and sat at the corner table closest to the door with a pot of steaming sencha warming in his palm. 

The Fire Lord had grown into his title in the four years of her absence. They had seen each other at parties, of course, and kept abreast of celebrations and birthdays and weddings and funerals through letters and messenger hawks, but this was her first taste of him outside of a ballroom in nearly half a decade. 

His hair was longer than it used to be, pulled back into a simple top knot that was free from his flame-shaped headpiece. He was broader now, too and his face was more angular -- all hard planes and smooth contours where there had once been the residue of baby fat. He wore a simple tunic of maroon and gold silk, and though he donned none of the regalia, she would remiss to see him as anything other than royal. 

She was careful to stay out of sight, settling into the steady rhythm of her morning chores as the Fire Lord and his uncle broke bread. She bent water into open teapots and straightened up their sleeping quarters, the low rumble of laughter and murmur of conversation punctuating the early hours of the morning as she went. 

After a while, there was a clatter of cart wheels through the open window, and she greeted the baker at the kitchen entrance for their daily delivery. The conversation out in the shop had died down. Katara popped a puff of cream-filled pastry into her mouth, set a thick tart covered with lemon cream and shiny berries -- Uncle’s favorite -- onto a platter and approached their table. 

His eyes caught on her, glinting amber in the morning sunlight, and his good eyebrow knitted in confusion. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and then promptly shut it again. 

“Ah,” Iroh smiled and winked at her, “I must have forgotten to mention my newest assistant. She has excellent taste in fruit tarts.” 

Katara set the pastry down in front of him and bent down to kiss Uncle’s cheek. 

“And men,” Iroh added, a loud chuckle reverberating through his chest at his own joke. 

“It is good to see you,” Katara said. She cupped her right hand atop her left fist in a formal Water Tribe gesture, and bowed towards him, “Fire Lord Zuko.” 

His mouth pressed into a firm line and he inclined his head towards her, "Master Katara." 

He would not meet her eyes. 

"If you will excuse me Uncle, I have business to attend to this morning." 

Iroh started to protest, but Zuko stood from the table, placed his open palm atop a closed fist and bowed towards his Uncle ( _he should have bowed to no one_ ). 

He did not look at her as he left. 

* * *

On the rare occasions that she and Aang visited the South Pole, she liked to spend her mornings out on the glacier. She liked watching the rising sun glint in rainbow fractals across the snow and down, down, down into the deep, blue ice. Sokka and her father had done beautiful things with the city below, and she liked the way the cool blue glowstone lamps dotted the carefully laid out streets and parks from this distance in the early morning light. She liked the quiet. 

The parka drawn up tight around her ears muffled the whistle of the winds, dampened the murmur of the new city on the horizon as its residents rose to greet the day. 

There was a buzzing that accompanied her days now, flitting between the Western and the Southern Air temples, to locations of strife and of adventure across the world at a moment’s notice with whatever directions the winds blew him. The winds became as constant a companion as Hei Lee. 

Chatter, too. 

They were a communal people, the Air Nomads. They ate together, prayed together, played together, meditated together. Aang told her often that this was what he wanted to show her when they first visited this place all those years ago. The Southern Air Temple: alive and teeming with energy and laughter for the first time in over a century.

She supposed she should have been overjoyed by it all.

1358 days since Sozin’s Comet, and every one of them filled with noise.

So, yes -- she liked the quiet. 

With thick, seal-skin mittens lined with arctic hare fur discarded into the snow, Katara began to bend. 

It was a trivial thing, after all they had been through. 

She really should have been practicing offensive moves. Ice daggers and water whips and such. The kind of thing that she spent aching hours under the moonlight mastering while her brother and friends slept. The kind of thing that was useful. The kind of thing that had saved their lives on more occasions than she could count. 

Instead, she focused again on the water in the air, the pressure of the wind and the ice together. She drew it towards her, swirling it into soft, gentle crystals and a burst erupted from her hands. 

Snow. 

And through the soft cloud of snowflakes that danced around her, that caught on her eyelashes and stuck to her hair, she paused. 

There was something out there, on the horizon where the ice met the sky. 

Something inky black. 

Humming. 

Pulsating. 

Something moving, and moving at her fast. 

* * *

“You can’t keep avoiding me!” 

A muscle in his jaw jumped, but he did not turn to her from his conversation with the Earth Kingdom officer. 

The music at the party was a bright, playful thing that mixed well with polite conversation and even better with court insinuations, but Katara could barely hear it over the rush of her own blood in her ears and the flush of sparkling sweet wine running through her veins. 

King Kuei had been delighted that _not only_ was the Fire Lord visiting, but that waterbending master and Hundred Year War hero, Katara, was hidden in plain sight right in the heart of _his little city_. Such an occasion called for a party, Kuei decided. And with the summer council of nations meeting in just a few short weeks, what better way to show a little international hospitality? 

"Excuse me, Admiral Qui Zhong." 

The Fire Lord ducked his head and placed his now-empty cup of sake on a passing server's platter as he took Katara's arm and all but yanked her onto an open balcony. Neither noticed the admiral's befuddled expression at the conversation cut so immediately short, nor the way that partygoers started to whisper as the Fire Lord closed the doors behind them. 

The night was balmy, but the light breeze was a reprieve from the stifling press of warm bodies and politics inside. 

"What is wrong with you?" He turned to her. 

"You're avoiding me!"

"I am not avoiding you _."_ he said, "See? Look, I'm right here. Little hard to avoid the person standing in front of you."

He leaned against the railing and crossed his arms over his chest. Defiant. 

"No," she repeated, her words slurring together, "you _are_ avoiding me, Your Majesty Fire Lord Hotman. You leave whenever you see me in the shop. You won’t stay for dinner, even when Uncle asks you to. You abandoned a Pai Sho game right in the middle when I came home with groceries yesterday!" 

She swayed slightly. 

“I bought komodo chicken,” she said, pouting her lower lip out, “Your favorite.”

A shadow passed over his eyes as he looked at her, molten gold in the filtering lamplight.

_Why was it so hot out here? Why was the moon so bright? It was giving her a headache, could someone please turn it down? Had he always been this pretty? And where was that nice caterer with the rose sake?_

" _Spirits,_ Katara," he pinched the bridge of his nose, "You're drunk." 

And _you're…_ " she grappled for words, like trying to hold sand between her fingers, "a meanie face." 

She pointed a finger into his chest and he caught her wrist with his hand. She giggled, even after he released it. 

"Go back to Uncle's." 

"No." 

" _Katara._ " 

" _Zuko_." 

He threw his hands up in the air, "Fine, I’m avoiding you, okay? I'm _mad_ _at you_ , Katara!" 

She flinched. 

"I think I have a right to be! He's my _friend_." The words cut into her, slicing through the thick haze that clouded her vision and judgement. "After what you did to him, you should count yourself lucky that I'm even talking to you at all." 

"You could have just talked to me at Uncles'--" 

"Yeah, and you could have helped me find my mother. You could have been at the peace talks in Yu Dao. You could have married Aang like you were _supposed to,_ " he spat. 

" _Agni,_ when did _you_ turn into the most selfish woman I know?" 

The balcony fell silent.

"I don't think I want to be here anymore," Katara murmured into the night, shrinking away from him. She hugged her arms tightly around herself. 

Zuko's lips pressed into a thin line. 

She felt childish, and small, and stupid, and coming here was a mistake, and he hated her, and _he hated her,_ and the balcony was spinning, and spinning, or maybe she was spinning, and _spirits_ her head hurt, and --

Her stomach roiled and she heaved over the side of the balcony, spilling the contents of her dinner (and most of the cocktail hour) out into the gardens below. 

She felt warm hands brush her neck from behind and lift the heavy curtain of her hair away from her face. 

When she was finally done ( _was it minutes or decades?_ ) he called inside for his personal guard, quiet enough that the other party goers would not hear him. 

"Please escort Master Katara home. She has taken quite ill from dinner. Bad octopus-eel, I think." 

* * *

She found herself at the gilded doors of the tea house before she could even blink. How had she gotten here?

Two guards in red and black, their helmets and epaulets lined with gold, had her wedged between their bodies, her arms stretched across their shoulders. 

She waved them away, taking a shaky step towards the doors, fishing her keys out from within the pockets of her skirts. She only fumbled with them three times before the right one found purchase and she entered the dark shop. 

Iroh was, if nothing else, the life of every party. He would surely be somewhere in the palace until dawn, as he had been at nearly every occasion she had attended with him before. Though, at _those_ parties she had been on Aang's arm spending far more time wrangling him away from the dance floor and towards dignitaries and mediating foreign conflicts than she had been paying attention to the Fire Nation royal family. 

When Katara finally made it inside, she stumbled to their apartments and collapsed onto her futon, hoping that when she woke up, the memories of the night and the fool she had made of herself would be as blurry as her vision. 

* * *

When she woke, it was still dark and she was not alone. Her head felt like it was cleft in two, splitting and searing down the middle of her skull, but she could see clearly and she no longer had the overwhelming desire to regurgitate what was left of her dinner. 

He passed her a small cup of warm lavender tea and leaned his head back against the wall. He closed his eyes and sighed. 

He was still in his party clothes, the thick swaths of black and gold silk robes pooling around his knees where he sat, legs criss crossed over each other. His hair was pulled into another half top-knot with the crown slotted in the middle of it -- it was messy, and a few errant strands tumbled away from it’s grasp and clung to the edges of his face along the ridges and planes of the mottled red-purple skin on his left side, his damaged ear.

She was still in her dress, too, she realized. A midnight blue thing studded with shining silver crystals like stars in the night sky. Iroh had liked the red one on her, but she wanted blue and so she bought it. 

"I'm sorry," he finally said. "I was angry. I’m _still_ angry. But it’s no excuse. What I said was... wrong. I'm sorry, Katara." 

"It's okay," she murmured. She hugged her knees up to her chest. "I was selfish. I _am_ selfish." 

"No," he said, shaking his head. " _No_ , I didn't mean that." 

"I am," she whispered. "I've done horrible things. I don't know how to stop." 

She reached a tentative hand up to the zipper at the back of her neck and pulled, shimmying it down just enough that she could reach around and tug it further down her back. She pulled her arms from the sleeves, and reached them up through the throat of her dress so that her shoulders and the tops of her breasts caught the dim light. 

"What are you doing?" he blurted out, confusion and -- was that _embarrassment_? -- hot on his tongue. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before when they had traveled together during the war, but even in the dark room she could see his blush rising from his neck, bleeding up into his right cheek. 

She pulled the dress down to her waist, revealing her white bindings, and the truth of it. 

His breath caught. 

" _Agni_ , Katara _.”_

* * *

The spirit grabbed hold of her, yanking her upside down by her ankles. She felt the scream more than she heard it, rubbing her throat raw. She slashed out with ice, with water, with teeth with her raking fingernails, but the spirit seemed unfazed by any assault. 

Slowly, it raised something like an arm and pressed the tip of it into her chest. 

Fire. Ice. Steel. Tearing and ripping and _awful_ into the space where her heart beat wildly within her. 

It pressed deeper, pulsating energy mingling with her blood and she gasped as this spirit -- this _thing_ \-- pushed its way into her chest, twining with her own chi, her own spirit. Bending the energy within herself. 

She felt her hands move, calling up a tsunami of ice and ocean water towards her, but she did not command them. She felt feet move towards the flickering lights below the glacier, felt her spirit pulsate haphazardly beneath _its_ grasp. She grappled for control, but found her limbs filled with lead when she tried to move them on her own. 

Katara. Master waterbender at the age of 14, the Avatar's personal teacher, hero of the Hundred Year War: rendered powerless to this _thing._

When it was finished with her, and half of the newly rebuilt Southern Water Tribe lay under an avalanche of snow and ice and chaos, she lay ragged on the glacier, spirit energy rippling like shock-waves through her body. 

It left her the way it came; her chest exploded like a supernova as the spirit burst out into the sky. 

It left her broken, gasping, and alone in the snow.

They would find her soon, half-covered in ice and with toes and fingers half-frozen. They would carry her inside the healing huts. They would lower her down into the waters and they would clutch her hand and beg her to _please please please please just stay alive please Katara please._

But for now it left her bloodied, with three broken ribs and a cracked skull. A thick smear of dark purple-black scar tissue swept up her left breast towards her throat and low towards her navel. It could not be healed or faded, no matter how much she scrubbed at it, no matter how much spirit water she used.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to you for beginning Katara's journey; it holds a special place in my heart and the next chapters should be out this month. 
> 
> This is my first fic in almost a decade, so comments are always appreciated, but never expected.


	2. ii. from blossoms

**ii. from blossoms**

For a time after, they didn’t talk. 

_What was there to say?_

Katara slipped back into the dress and felt him relax as the fabric curtained over her skin. She didn’t bother with the zipper. She busied her hands pulling the pins from her hair, loosing the curls one by one to join the rest in a wild halo of frizz. 

He was the first person she had told-- besides Aang and Sokka, of course, but they didn’t really count. 

They had been there. 

They had seen what she had done.

“Uncle told me you lost your bending.”

Of course he had. There were nights when she thought she felt eyes on her out in the gardens, knee deep in the pond, face turning purple as she begged, pleaded for just a single drop to rise.

She dropped a pearl-studded pin into the pile in her lap. 

“I couldn’t stay, Zuko.” 

When Iroh’s heavy, unsteady footsteps sounded through the shop, Zuko left. 

And when he returned the next morning and brewed them both cups of strong, black tea it wasn't so much a forgiveness as a truce.

* * *

Her palms grew slick and she readjusted her grasp on the full market basket, creeping closer to the cracked kitchen window in the alleyway behind the shop and the rising voices within it. 

“--- not that easy! How do I just _let it go?”_

“She is not the first person to lose her way, nephew,” Iroh said, "And I did not think you were this kind of a man, anymore."

“Old wounds, Uncle," Zuko said, and she could hear the weariness in his voice even from here.

Iroh made a sound, low and rumbling in his throat. 

“And Mai?” he asked, a knowing about him, “An old wound?”

Zuko did not speak.

* * *

The wedding had been about as ostentatious as she had expected for the Fire Lord and Fire Lady -- all gold and rubies, gossamer and red silks-- but the ceremony itself was a short and intimate affair. 

With the couple kneeling before the Fire Sage, Iroh placed Zuko and Mai’s hands together, palm to palm. He looped a shock of red silk around their wrists and over their fingers with each recitation of vows until they were fully bound and Iroh was beaming. 

There were courtier whispers, of course, of what happens behind closed doors _(they’re only seventeen)_ , but anyone who saw the way that Zuko looked at Mai, saw the tremble in his hands before he kissed her at the altar, would know. 

This was simply and truly love. 

After an appropriate amount of fanfare, a decadent feast, dozens of toasts to the newlyweds, and a bending demonstration from the Avatar himself, the reception devolved into a party with alarming velocity. Katara had never seen so many dignitaries in one place outside of the council meetings, nor had she seen them so drunk.

For once, she didn’t stop Aang from shirking his responsibilities to drag her onto the dance floor, and she didn't stop him from dropping her into a low dip and kissing her in the middle of it either. 

"Stop upstaging the Fire Lord at his own wedding," Katara half-whispered, dizzy from more than just the dancing. Aang bent back down and kissed her again. 

There was still so much of the world left to rebuild, but, Katara decided, it could wait until tomorrow.

The party slowed sometime around midnight; pockets of conversation and laughter dispersed throughout the pavilion like puddles of rain water. Aang had disappeared somewhere with Toph and Sokka, and for her own sanity, Katara chose _not_ to think about what kind of trouble she would discover in the morning. Suki, Ty Lee, and a flush of Kyoshi Warriors surrounded Mai while they traded old combat stories. When they gifted her a new set of throwing knives, Katara dared to say that the Fire Lady looked almost _happy_. 

Zuko, who was caught in a dark corner by a decrepit-looking minister with a long grey beard and a hooked nose, however, did not. 

_Save me_ , his eyes pleaded.

Katara gave the Fire Nation dignitary her most flattering smile when she approached. 

“Apologies, Minister Feng. The Fire Lord promised me a dance tonight and I really can’t be kept waiting any longer." 

She hooked her arm around Zuko's and pulled him towards the music troupe, tossing Minister Feng a reproachful smile over her shoulder, "You understand!” 

He did not, in fact, understand, but neither she nor the Fire Lord stuck around long enough to hear his sputtering. 

The music was meandering and warm, and neither of them knew the steps. Zuko caught her hand in his and settled his other high on her waist, close to her ribs. They swayed together under the strings of paper lamps that crisscrossed above the pavilion, and let the other dancers maneuver around them. 

The night trickled by with a tenderness, like Yue herself had slowed time to a drip of honey so they could revel in it for just a little bit longer.

“You look happy,” she said. 

“I’m never happy,” Zuko deadpanned. But, he couldn’t hide the way his eyes drifted behind her towards his wife, nor the way he fought back a smile. 

“You deserve it,” Katara said, and he squeezed her hand in his. 

Her insides felt like bubbles floating to the surface of a glass of champagne, and she wasn't quite sure why. 

“It’s all going to be different now,” he said, his voice low as the song came to a slow descent, “With you all leaving tomorrow and the world starting to move on. It’s… I like having friends. I'm going to miss it.” 

She smiled and squeezed his hand back. 

"I'll always be your friend, Zuko.” 

And she had meant it. 

* * *

He stayed longer than he planned to most days after that, and Katara was grateful not to be the only one losing every night at Pai Sho anymore. 

"It's not your fault," he told her after another match, while Iroh dug in the kitchens for a new blend that had arrived in the shipment that morning, "What happened to you, I mean.”

Katara dug little half-moons into her palms with her fingernails.

 _"It's not,"_ Zuko repeated, with an edge to his voice that felt raw and tangled. When she finally looked up, he was focused on her with an intensity that she couldn't read. 

"But you can’t--" he paused, searching, "You can't let it be your excuse.”

 _“Okay,_ Zuko.” She just wanted him to stop talking. 

"We make choices, Katara." 

There was no malice to it. His scar caught the lamplight and his partially blind eye shifted towards her, and the ghosts of fights long forgiven still hung between them.

* * *

Aang spent more time in the Spirit World than with her. 

The rumors of the dark spirit trickled in from the ports and provinces; in the two weeks since the first attack, Sokka confirmed three sightings from the Kyoshi Warriors as far north as Whale Tail island and Bato relayed an account from one of their hunting parties to the west. It moved quickly, and was near impossible to track. 

They kept what they could under wraps, and wrote none of it down. Their sister tribe to the North had been looking for any excuse to grab power as it was, even without the circulating rumors that the chief’s daughter had destroyed half of the city and a quarter of their fishing fleet with it. And while there hadn't been any more attacks since the first one, they all settled into a sense of hanging at a precipice, of dangling just over the belly of the beast. 

"I don't know why he's bothering with it," she said. The taut pain in her side plucked like the strings on a pipa and she winced as Suki helped her into a fresh tunic. 

"Aang’s going to find the thing that did this," Suki said, gently. She tied the small white strings at Katara’s waist. 

_"I_ did this." She could still feel the way the spirit had moved the ocean through her. Suki rested a hand on Katara’s arm, and she could see the concern even through the heavy Kyoshi makeup. 

“ _Katara_ \--” 

“Thanks, Suki,” she cut her off, but found that she couldn’t look anywhere but at her lap, “I’ve got it from here.”

In truth, she was a raw nerve, all prickling skin and lightning, and if Suki continued to push, she was not sure that she could keep from redirecting it. For once, Suki didn’t try to fight her on it. 

“I’ll be stationed just down the hall if you need me.” 

There was a dizziness to it, this panic blooming in her chest. Like there wasn’t enough air in her lungs to breathe, let alone speak. And when Suki left, she folded in on herself, pressed her head between her knees like Gran Gran had taught her. Gasping, like a koi out of water.

Katara had never had to worry about drowning before, but she imagined it felt a lot like this.

When she finally caught herself, Aang still hadn't moved from the lotus position at the far end of their room. He'd been there for the better part of three days now, and she'd taken to watching him.

 _Watching over him_ , she amended. 

There was little else for her to do; Sokka and her father wouldn’t let her help with the rebuilding _(you’re still healing)._ Not that she could have _rebuilt_ much in her current state, but still. It was the principle of the thing. 

So instead, she watched the gentle rise and fall of his chest while she darned another pair of his socks. She watched the deep crease of his brow while she pushed around the dinner in her bowl. And then, she watched his eyes finally flutter open into the dim lamplight, long hours after the sun had set, and watched the way he moved with a stiffness, like his bones needed oiling after disuse. 

He crawled into their bed with a groan and took her up in his arms. 

She didn't need to ask, but he shook his head anyway. _No spirit._

“You’re okay?” Aang murmured into her ear. His fingers traced her jaw, then the ribbons around her throat. 

She felt like screaming, but nodded instead. 

He looked at her for a time, and then like he was looking through her. And when his breathing turned even and steady as she mapped the pattern of his arrows along his arms, she knew that he had left her again before he had ever really come home.

* * *

Katara still couldn’t do the big things, but she found joy in the little moments when she could put out the call and find an answer. Water into teapots, one by one. Spilled oolong pulled out of silks. Ice cubes that never melted in their evening drinks. 

Healing was easier than the rest of it -- flesh more willing than the tides -- and she spent nearly all of her afternoons in the Lower Ring infirmary now. Katara learned the names and faces of the repeat offenders, the little girls and boys who were magnets for sprained ankles and chipped teeth. 

When water failed, bandages and yarrow root poultices bridged the gap. Herbs were a rarity in the South Pole, so she devoured the new information almost as fast as the Earth Kingdom healers could supply it. 

The other healers delighted when Katara bent a pool of clear water across a newborn's tiny lungs, and pulled the infection out and up through the skin. The baby cried for the first time in weeks, and his mother with him. 

It was good to be useful again.

* * *

When she asked if he would train with her again, she hadn't expected him to say yes. 

Finery discarded for sparring clothes. Less fabric, more skin.

He didn’t comment on it, even though she felt him linger on the blackened flesh. If Katara were another woman, she might have let herself indulge in taut muscle and a broad frame. Instead, her eyes caught on the puckered sunburst in the middle of his chest, and she figured they were even. 

Zuko fought with swords instead of fire, and she was often ragged and frayed by the time they finished. He was not a gentle sparring partner by nature. But, when he could see a certain wobble at the edge of a wave and the exertion blooming across her forehead, he would call the match. 

It was never an act of pity. 

“You did good today,” he said, after their eighth night of trying not to kill each other. Katara was still working to steady her breath.

“High praise, Sifu Hotman.”

"Don't push your luck," Zuko said, but a warm hand settled on her shoulder. 

She sat for a while, relished in a cup of warm pu'erh with Iroh as the sky dipped into hazy purples and greys. Zuko ran through his forms in the center of the garden, small bursts of controlled fire illuminating in the ripples of the pond, the scales of the koi fish. 

Uncle’s papery hand covered hers, thumb brushing over her skin, and he gave her a contented smile before critiquing the Fire Lord’s form. 

“Your shoulders, nephew. You must learn to _breathe_. Fire comes--” 

“From the breath,” Zuko finished, but he seemed amused, rather than annoyed, “Yes, thank you, Uncle.”

He took a steady inhale and moved through the form again. This time, the fire that burst from his palm was streaked with deep purples, bright blues, and warm pinks. 

_Dragon fire,_ Aang had called it once. 

Iroh delighted with a clap, and Zuko couldn’t hide the glow at his uncle’s praise. She was reminded of the boy she had known, and the sandal he had kept, and Katara bit back a smile. 

When Zuko was finished, Uncle retreated back to their sleeping quarters with a kiss to her cheek, and Katara stood. She pulled a bubble of water up from the pond, giving it a tentative swirl around her before hardening the end of it into a thin point of ice. 

Zuko quirked his good eyebrow. 

“Again?” he asked. 

She sunk back into her fighting stance, pushing her hair out of her eyes and ignoring the dull ache in her limbs. He drew his swords from the scabbard on his back. 

“Again.” 

Every day, she lasted a little longer.

* * *

He brought his work with him more often than not, and when Iroh excused himself from their discussions on the first night, the Fire Lord had settled for her.

Like the rest of them, the Fire Nation was still recovering from the war. And although the initial uprisings had died down in the first year after he took the throne, Zuko was not a popular leader. 

Coffers too empty, mouths not full enough. 

He had lost seven advisors to court politics in as many months, and she learned that this extended trip to the Earth Kingdom was less about diplomacy and more about another purge of his cabinet and another spike of poison in his tea. 

Zuko passed her the sheaf of papers they had been working on the night before. Katara had taken to checking and double checking his numbers and refining his proposals with a flick of ink. As it turned out, five years of brokering peace treaties with the Avatar meant she wasn’t half bad at civic planning, or politics, or budgets. 

Katara tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear as she read through another missive from the outer islands. 

Grain production at the southernmost tip of the archipelago had dropped by nearly half in the last year, despite the fair weather and new subsidies that the Crown provided. At this rate, they wouldn’t make it through the rainy season without a new (and expensive) trade deal with the Earth Kingdom, or a civil war.

They discussed solutions late into the evening, and then argued about them. _(I won’t proposition the governors. My people have taken enough from the Earth Kingdom already)._ And when they finally grew tired of crop yields and petty domestic squabbles, she found that she was close enough to feel the warmth radiating from him. 

He shifted, and shoulder bumped shoulder. The moment stretched so long and so delicate that she thought it might snap. He didn't move away. 

It was almost strange, the way they fell back into this rhythm. 

There had been nights on Ember Island before the comet when they had sat like this together, long after their friends had gone to sleep. They talked of the war, of course -- what it had taken from them and what it had yet to -- but mostly, they told stories. Old fables and folklore they had grown up with or learned along the way. 

Sometimes, when the day had dragged against them too hard or too long, they just sat on the steps, knees almost touching, and listened to each other breathe.

"Did I ever tell you about the one about the Mother and the Moon?" she asked. 

Zuko nodded and dropped his head back against the oak tree they had settled under, eyes closed. An exhaustion sagged his shoulders and creased premature lines into his brow. She was well acquainted with it: the kind of tired that even sleep couldn't fix. 

"It’s one of my favorites, though," he murmured, "I don't mind if you tell it again." 

Katara ran her fingers through the grass, bending the slick of dew that caught between them into a single small drop that hovered midair. 

"Long and ago when the world was new, and the world was dark," she began, "the first of the first of us emerged from the ice."

* * *

In the beginning, there was only the ice, you see, and she was alone. 

For three days and three nights she wailed in the darkness in her loneliness. Her tears dripped down the glaciers until they rose and swelled, and so was born La, the ocean.

They were happy, for a time. But where the ice was firm and unyielding, the ocean ebbed and flowed. Soon, he pulled away out into the world to the west. 

'My son, my son,' the ice wailed, 'Will you not stay with me?' 

But she received no answer. 

For three days and three nights, she flung pieces of herself out into the darkness, searching for her son. The pieces caught in the sky instead and so was born Tui, the moon. 

They, too, were happy for a time. But where the ice stood tall and proud, the moon waned and dwindled in the darkness. Soon, she drifted east to the horizon, and then below. 

'My daughter, my daughter,' the ice cried, 'Will you not stay with me?'

But she received no answer. 

And for three more days and three more nights, she broke her heart in two and breathed life into the first Healer and the first Warrior. 

'My children,' the ice said, 'your brother and sister are lost to me. Will you not return them so that our family may be whole?' 

'Grant me the power to harness the waves,’ the Warrior spoke. And she did. 

'Grant me the power to harness the moon,’ the Healer spoke. And she did. 

The Healer set out to the east, and found Tui hanging in the sky by a sliver of light at the end of the end of all things. She reached for the moon, and pushed her energy into it until the moon glowed bright, and full again.

The Warrior set out to the west, and found the La raging and nearing death at the end of the end of all things. He fought the current, and pulled its energy towards him until the ocean swelled, deep and flowing again.

When they returned to the ice, the moon and the ocean embraced their mother.

And whenever La began to drift, Tui pushed him back to shore. And whenever Tui began to wane, La pulled her light back across the sky. 

And for a time, they were happy. 

But where the ice was infinite, the Healer and the Warrior soon grew old, their skin sagging and their bones whittling. 

‘My children, my children,’ the ice whispered to them, ‘Will you not stay with me?’

‘We will always be with you,’ they said, curling up in her arms, ‘But change is the nature of all things, and as the ocean ebbs and flows, and as the moon waxes and wanes, so must we.’

When they passed from this life to the next, their spirit soaked the ice. And for three days and three nights, the ice carved pieces of herself from her hips, and from her rose the first of the first of us. 

‘My sisters,’ the moon said, ‘I grant you, and your daughters, and your daughter’s daughters strength under my light.’ 

‘My brothers,’ the ocean said, ‘I grant you, and your sons, and your son’s sons power in my currents.’ 

‘My children,’ the ice said, ‘I grant you, and your children, and your children’s children the freedom of change and of life.’ 

The ice gathered her children up in her hands and spread them across her, and let them journey far and let them journey wide. 

And so that was how the first waterbenders came to be, and the ice was no longer alone, and they were happy.

* * *

When she finished, they eased into the muffled din of the city: the croak of horned toads, the clatter of cart wheels, the occasional float of distant voices on the breeze. 

And then as soon as it had begun, whatever spell had fallen over them was broken. 

"I should go.” 

"You don't have to." 

Katara knew he would leave before he even stood. 

It was easier when Iroh was around, or when they were sparring, or when they had some problem to bicker about. But when they were alone, in these quiet moments it was just... like this between them, now. 

Eggshells and averted gazes. 

There was still Aang. There was still Mai. 

And when he glanced back at her before he closed the garden gate and melted into the darkness, Katara knew there was still too much of each other's lives that they had missed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you can't already tell, I do actually like the cannon couples, but I'm also a contrarian and (enemies to) friends to lovers is just *chef's kiss.* 
> 
> Also, I've expanded this to a 5 chapter fic -- the drafting and editing processes have pushed my outline out a bit more than I expected, but I like to give my stories room to breathe. 
> 
> Finally and most importantly, thank you so much for reading! Comments always appreciated. There will be more to come near the beginning of the month. 
> 
> Poetry inspiration for parts of this (and last) chapter  
> \- From Blossoms by Li-Young Li  
> \- The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel


	3. iii. this wild, caged thing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone getting a sneaking sense of deja vu, I've had to repost chapter 3. My first post this afternoon was from an old draft and was accidentally missing a big chunk of important plot / context. (this is what I get for posting from my phone instead of my computer...). It's been checked and double checked this time, and all the straggling bits are in place where they should be now. 
> 
> Thanks for understanding, and enjoy :)

**iii. this wild, caged thing**

It hadn't always been this way.

* * *

After the coronation, they stayed with him at the palace through the spring equinox. They cited peace treaties and advisory committees, but in truth, none of them quite knew what to do with themselves now that it was over. 

“So, this is, uh, your room,” Zuko rubbed the back of his neck, “Suki’s next door.”

“Not that she’ll be there much,” Toph said. 

Katara faked gagging, "Please don't remind me." 

“I hope it’s okay,” Zuko said while Toph cackled, “I didn’t think you’d want Azula’s.” 

She shook her head and set her bag down by the doorway, “Thanks.”

It was, by all accounts, beautiful -- all overstuffed cushions and ornate carvings dipped in gold, with large windows that looked out over sprawling courtyards, and gardens, and then the heart of the city further out below. The bedroom itself was larger than Katara’s entire home had been growing up, to say nothing of the personal bathhouse tucked in the corner, fed by a nearby hot spring. 

And the bed. _Spirits, the bed_. There had been too many months spent sleeping on hard earth or on the back of a flying bison. It enveloped her so thoroughly in cool silks and plush pillows that she thought she might just suffocate and die happy. 

Now, if only she could actually sleep. 

At first, she thought it was the full moon, silvery light pouring through the windows and thrumming in her blood. But when Katara closed the curtains and still found herself straining to hear soft breathing and a rustle of wind through grass, she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and padded out into the gardens, barefoot. 

Toph was already there, a stone tent erected in the very center. 

“You too, Sugar Queen?” 

Aang was curled up next to Toph. As she settled next to him, he blinked up at Katara, bleary eyed and with the creases of his pillow imprinted into his right cheek. 

It was so easy to love him.

And when Katara woke the next morning, Aang’s arm was still slung around her waist, his even breath painting across the back of her neck. The five of them sprawled in a loose pile around the new Fire Lord. A piece of grass was stuck in the shaggy flop of his black hair, and his amber eyes were sharp and alert; he was always the first of them to rise. 

Toph shifted, stretching out horizontally across Sokka and Suki and kicking a heel into Zuko’s other side. 

Katara stifled a laugh when he winced. 

“Rude,” he breathed, but he gifted her a small smile. 

She returned it, “Morning.” 

This new day would bring the start of rebuilding. It was a return to uncertainty, an _after_ to everything that had come before. 

There was so much to do. 

But for now, she settled back into the crook of Zuko’s shoulder, and her brother’s gentle snores, and the steady rise and fall of Aang’s chest at her back. She heard the chittering of servants along the wings of the palace and was sure that little whispers would echo through the court for weeks, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. 

It was quiet and it was warm, and they were careful not to wake the rest of them. 

Home wasn’t so much a place as it was people for her now.

* * *

So much of it, she found out in bits and pieces.

He didn't talk about her often, but when he did it was the slip of 'was' here, the way Zuko stopped himself from saying her name there. 

"You are more alike than you may think," Iroh told her when she finally asked as they broke for their midday meal, “Ursa was a lovely woman, but my brother was a cruel man.” 

_The Fire Nation took my mother away from me._

_That’s something we have in common_ , he had said

"What she did for my nephew…” Iroh poured the tea into her cup, “I was sorry to hear of what happened to her when he returned."

Katara nodded. 

_(sacrifices)_

There were never statues with carved names like _Ursa_ or _Kya._

She touched the cool stone at her throat. 

* * *

She thought of the fishing village and the man cowering in the rain.

* * *

Maybe what surprised her most was how much he pushed her. 

He wasn't exactly subtle. If Aang was a nudge, Zuko was a shove off of a cliff. His temper had, well, _tempered_ with age and with politics. But when he had a bone to pick he still ran hot and he still ran fast. Barbed tongue and bared teeth. She was sure there was some innuendo in there somewhere, but Katara was too busy trying not to get her head taken clean off by a flash of metal to really dwell on it. 

"Watch it!" 

It was the Jasmine Dragon that had sparked it, though she shouldn't have been surprised; it was his new favorite point to prod at when Iroh wasn’t there to moderate. 

"So, you'll just be some tea shop waitress for the rest of your life?" Zuko had said when a particularly sour mood bled from a day of meetings into their evening routine. 

"Don't start," she had warned. 

"I'm not _starting_ anything." 

It ended with both of them breathless, a thin point of ice pinning him back against the garden wall by the throat. 

"Yield." 

“This conversation isn’t over.” 

_“Yield.”_ Katara pressed the ice a little closer. He dropped his swords to the ground.

* * *

She thought of the fishing village, and the man cowering beneath her in the rain, and _Zuko._

* * *

There was a letter with Mai's signature tucked between the stacks of reports. It was worn and stained. Creased, like it had been folded and unfolded in a dozen different places over a dozen different months. 

He passed her the education minister's report, and she pretended not to notice the way Zuko tucked the letter to the bottom of the pile, or the way he gripped the ink brush a little tighter.

* * *

She spent the better part of the afternoon being berated. 

"Is that it?" Pakku chided, "I thought you'd at least try."

 _"I am_ trying, _"_ she grated out through clenched teeth.

The pavilion of the recently rebuilt training hall had been cleared out for her, and she was glad not to have an audience, save for Sokka who was busy carving the handle of a new whalebone dagger under the eaves of the school. 

"It's like this," Aang said, gently, demonstrating the way that she was supposed to pull the water up from the bucket and push it back and forth between her hands. 

"I know what it's supposed to look like!" she snapped. 

"Then do it," Pakku said, kicking the bucket closer to her and sloshing the water out over her boots in the process. 

She ran through the move again and again, gritting her teeth, until even Pakku grew tired of watching her fail and her lips turned fourteen shades of blue and the pain in her side stretched tight and taut, like a bowstring pulled back. 

Aang stopped trying to correct her form, and left the pavilion sometime between the third and the fourth argument that she had tried to start. They ate dinner in silence and neither slept when they finally settled back into their bed together that night. 

“I still--” Aang started, and then paused, “You know that none of this changes how I feel about you, right?” 

“I know,” she said, facing towards the wall, because she didn’t know how to tell him that she didn’t.

_weak weak weak weak weak weak weak weak weak weak weak weak weak weak weak_

“We can postpone the wedding.” 

She shook her head, “No. It’s… everyone’s looking forward to it.” 

“Okay,” he hesitated, “If you’re sure.” 

“I’m sure.” 

“Okay.” He brushed the hair away from her neck so that it cascaded over the pillow, pressing a kiss to her upper back and then trailing another to the notch where her throat met the slope of her shoulder. He let his fingers splay over the planes of her stomach, low and wandering.

“I’m tired, Aang.” 

The warmth of his hand retreated to his side of the bed, the first in what would become a long string of deflections. He pressed a final kiss to her shoulder. 

“Okay.”

* * *

Later, Zuko caught her worrying the outline of her scar through the cotton over her heart. 

“Sorry,” she muttered, like she had done whenever Aang had asked her about it. She dropped her hand to her lap.

"It’s not…” he paused, unreadable, “I used to do it, too."

* * *

It wasn't a letter from Mai, she discovered later. It was a copy of their vows.

* * *

Iroh accompanied her to the market. They ducked between the shade of stalls to escape the dry summer heat and tested the tender flesh of ripe mangoes between their fingers. One of Zuko's personal guards trailed them; it was less a kindness than it was an anxiety, but she found it hard to blame him for his paranoia.

When a little boy tripped in the middle of the street and turned into a puddle of tears and skinned knees and scraped palms, she was the first to him. Water around hands around shredded flesh. 

It was just instinct.

"It is not weakness to ask for help," Iroh said, after the little boy's mother thanked her, "We all need picking up from time to time."

Katara stood and dusted her hands off on her tunic, "Home?" 

Uncle held his arm out for her and she took it. 

* * *

It was harder than she thought it would be to get him to stop working. Zuko had two switches it seemed: _on_ and _sleep._ And frankly, he did about as much of the latter as she did these days. 

"You need a break," she argued when she caught him nodding off over a letter to the new advisor they had chosen from a pool of candidates that evening. 

"I'm fine." 

In the end, the only thing she could convince him of was to come with her to the Lower Ring infirmary the next day -- _for research_ , of course, on how the Earth King had been spending his share of the peace payments.

The Lower Ring was still dipped in squalor, but the streets were cleaner now and there were not quite so many people begging on their corners. Zuko seemed to fit into the bustling streets with a practiced ease, knew where to wind down a side alley to cut time and stopped regularly to drop small handfuls of gold coins into otherwise empty upturned hats.

He didn't linger; he seemed to know as well as she did that the small mercies they could offer would only be enough for _now_ and not _forever._

The healers, it was safe to say, were less than thrilled with his arrival. He was more than recognizable even without the crown. 

But, Zuko dabbed sticky sap to the ends of bandages and rifled through labeled tinctures and poultices on her instruction, anyway. He re-lit a fire beneath a small cauldron when it went out and didn’t complain when Healer Yuma -- all pursed lips and narrowed eyes -- stuck shrewdly by his side throughout.

When Rulon hobbled in on his crutch, Katara moved her hand over his knee and the familiar gnarled, warped border of bones that clicked and bowed beneath. She tested his joint gently, appraised the tightness of the bandage she had applied last week and was satisfied to find it gave very little. 

It took her longer than it should have to feel the sinews of the muscle, to find the pluck of tendons and ligaments connecting the complicated anatomy of his knee through the water in her palms. Rulon whimpered, and Katara almost missed Zuko’s low voice for all her focus.

“Have you ever heard the story of Agni the Great Dragon?” 

A rustle of fabric like the shake of a head, and she knew Rulon would like this one mostly because Zuko never tired of telling it. 

“The Sages tell us that the world is held on the backs of great dragons,” he began. 

It was a long story, told in many parts over many evenings and he barely got through the beginnings before she was finished. And when she looked up, the other healers and their patients around them had quieted to listen and Rulon had Zuko’s hand clutched in his tiny fist. 

“Better?” she asked. He sniffled, and nodded. 

Katara settled her hands on her hips as she watched the other children in the neighborhood flock to Rulon when he steadily tottered out into their game of tag. Zuko leaned back against the counter beside her, working a rag between his hands absentmindedly. 

Healer Yuma appraised the two of them, “It seems you are not so useless, Fire Lord.” 

“Only occasionally,” Zuko said. 

“Bring him back sometime,” Yuma said to Katara. 

Zuko looked at her. 

“I'll try.” 

* * *

She thought of the dock, and the sunset, and all the times after when he had been beside her after that. Folding the pile of laundry with her. Helping her tend to the stew.

* * *

"I thought divorce was illegal in the Fire Nation," she said quietly, nearly three weeks into his stay, while they read through a trade report between her nation and his. A splash of ink dripped from his stilled brush, spreading slowly on the paper and seeping through the back onto the grass.

 _"Uncle,"_ he muttered under his breath. 

Zuko pinched the bridge of his nose. He had been doing a lot of that lately. 

They had separated four months before she arrived in Ba Sing Se. Iroh said it would be made official after the council convened at the end of the month; with the Earth Kingdom governors itching for expanded fishing territory and another round of gold to line their pockets, the Fire Nation could not afford to appear weak.

Zuko hadn’t written her about it. 

"She didn't want kids," Zuko said simply, like he was practiced with this line of thinking, "I changed the law and the Sages made an exception. Line of succession, and all that." 

_We were so young_ , hung around the edges. She wondered if that was all of it; when Katara had seen her at parties over the years, Mai had become more soldier than Fire Lady, more steel than flesh, until she had stopped attending at all. Not that Katara was in any position to judge. 

"And you do?" she asked, “Want kids, I mean. Someday.”

"I know what's expected of me." 

Zuko picked up the crown that he had discarded when they sparred, turning it over in his palms so that the gold caught the light of their lanterns. It was a quiet thing, the way he weighed the heavy heirloom and ran his fingers along the edges, catching at the tips of the flames. Even if she could have dipped into his thoughts, she didn't need to. 

"You'll be a good father, Zuko." 

"You don't... You don't know that," he shook his head. His voice broke a little at the end, and he didn't need to say it, "Ozai--" 

"Isn't _you,"_ she finished for him, "And you're Iroh's son in all the ways that count, anyway."

He looked up towards the sky in the all too familiar way and swallowed, hard. He let out a shuddering breath. 

"You know, you're annoyingly nice sometimes," Zuko said when he could speak again. 

"Guess I haven't spent enough time around you, _Your Gloominess_.” She made a face at him and when he bumped his knee against hers, she felt like she was fourteen again. 

One of the turtleducks honked, so she tore a small piece from the stale bread they brought with them and tossed it out into the pond. 

"We should get back to…" he gestured to their work on the grass. 

"Yeah."

* * *

They had talked of children often.

Two, they decided. One airbender, one waterbender -- as if it would really be that simple. 

They tested names on long rides through the clouds between the Temples and meetings with foreign dignitaries and eventually, they practiced the making of them into the long hours of the night. 

When Gran Gran educated her on the affairs of a man and a woman on their wedding night, it was six months after she had found herself beneath him, his grey eyes memorizing her in a dimming fire on the outskirts of the Mo Che Sea. 

She was eighteen. 

"It is a sacred act," Gran Gran told her, and it had been. 

It was a worship, this tenderness. The way he breathed her name with the spirits' and gripped her hands between his fingers in some kind of prayer. They fell apart with regularity, then, and if you had asked her what her name was, all you would have heard was his.

But then again, maybe that had been the beginning of it-- of this life that wasn't quite hers.

* * *

Zuko finally told her one night while they cleaned up after dinner. 

Iroh had disappeared out into oppressive heat of the city for a local Pai Sho tournament, so it was just the two of them over a basin of hot, soapy water and the remnants of fat udon noodles in a salty miso broth. 

"It was my father,” Zuko said. 

Katara's hands stilled with her heart. 

"What?" 

He gestured to his face, the mottled red skin streaking over his left eye, "Mine." 

"Oh," she said dumbly. She dunked a bowl beneath the water and scrubbed, "I… Suki told me. I've known for a while.”

"Ty Lee?" he asked. When she nodded, he let out a short huff of air through his nose almost like a laugh, and shook his head. 

"For a long time, I thought it was a mark of what was wrong with me. All the ways that I had failed, and would fail. I was so ashamed of who I was, and here was this thing as proof." 

A cold hitch. It was still a constant companion, but she had grown practiced at breathing through it when it tugged at the air in her lungs. 

Did he feel it, too? 

"My first advisor -- Feng. You remember him?" She passed him a clean bowl, and he dried it with a kitchen towel before nesting it back into the stack on the shelf, "He used to say it was a mark of how _strong_ I was."

Zuko scoffed, "But really, it's just cruelty. It's just pain. It's senseless. There is no grand _point_ to it." 

Katara gripped the edge of the basin so hard that her knuckles turned white. 

"Maybe we learn from it," he said, "Or grow. But maybe we just... live with it. I don't know. Sometimes, I think that's enough." 

Zuko settled his hand over hers, gently loosening her fingers from the basin's edge, and then lingering.

_(We make choices, Katara.)_

And when he looked at her, it was perhaps the first time she didn't see the sheen of disappointment, the sharp edge of betrayal for what she had done. 

"We aren't the things that happen to us,” he said, letting go of her hand. 

Katara passed him another bowl, and she knew.

* * *

She thought of a crackle of electricity, and the sapping of moisture from the air, and the time that he had saved her life, and the time that she had saved his in return.

* * *

She caught Zuko with a water whip around his ankle and relished in the small _oof_ that escaped his lungs when his back hit the earth. 

He groaned, "You fight dirty."

"Try to keep up," she teased, reaching a hand out to help him up. He sheathed his swords when he stood and then lit a fire in his palm. Katara bent a wave of brackish pond water up over his head. 

"You're going to regret that," he sputtered through his extinguished flame and dripping clothes. 

"You'll have to catch me first." 

She laughed. Zuko lunged. Hands snaked around her waist and tackled them both to the ground.

Maybe what surprised her most was that she didn’t mind when he caught her that time.

* * *

They said _I'm sorry_ in a million other ways before they spoke it. 

Zuko taught her how to hold the turtleducks, hand flat and still in the water until they nibbled at a hunk of bread and climbed into her palm. 

She made sure his favorite cinnamon tea was brewing while they sparred. 

Katara woke to a spread of fire lilies in a vase on the doorstep and a note in a familiar slanted scrawl. _Try not to kill these ones._

When she first learned that he hadn’t been sleeping again, she sent a courier to his apartments at the Earth King’s palace with sachets of valerian root and chamomile that she bought from the herbalists at the Lower Ring infirmary. 

He pressed her often on what she would do after Ba Sing Se, and minded more and more when she didn’t have answers. 

And then, one evening when midnight turned to early morning and neither could get up the courage to leave the garden first, she said, “After everything we went through together… I should have been there for you. I'm sorry, Zuko."

His eyes flicked to the collar of her tunic, to the smear of black flesh peeking out from behind a wall of blue cotton.

Zuko scrubbed a hand over his face and then stood. He reached out for the stack of papers, and when she passed the sheaf to him, she expected him to leave. 

Sometimes _sorry_ still isn’t enough. 

But then, “We both should have.”

He held his free hand out again, and she took it. They walked inside together, life brushing life again, and fingers brushing fingers.

* * *

The days slipped away from them after that, like the sands of an hourglass, cracked and spilling out across the earth. With each sunrise, the council of nations drew a little closer, and with each sunset, the taut squeeze in her chest drew in a little tighter. 

_Aang._

She ached to talk with him about it, but as Zuko’s month in the city whittled to a delicate point, their evenings together were postponed more and more frequently by messenger hawks and missives and meetings with the Earth King, until she hardly saw him at all. 

Though, for all of their conversations, this was the one they never approached. Perhaps it was better this way. 

Katara carved out her own little moments of joy in the dusky hours instead. Sometimes with Iroh, but more and more often without. He didn't mind, and she didn't ask. That was just the way of it between them. 

And when she caught herself absentmindedly tracing the places where Zuko's fingers had settled over hers, she was glad there was no one around to see it. 

It was all borrowed time, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate you reading (especially if you read the first version earlier today!) 
> 
> I know this is a bit of a lighter chapter, but I really wanted to spend some time on how they restablish their relationship and test the boundaries of it. I toyed around with including more of the spirit plot, but it just didn't feel right. 
> 
> I'm also picking and choosing what I want to keep from the comics, which is to say I'm discarding like 99% of it, including Ursa's storyline. 
> 
> Anyway. 
> 
> Thank you again for reading! Comments are always appreciated. More to come soon :)


End file.
